(Page 2 of 3) Q: Let's talk about how DB2 10 speeds up processes and lowers data cost. People love to hear faster, lower cost. How are you accomplishing that?
A: First of all, we're extending our industry leading compression capabilities with what we're calling adaptive compression. Early access clients and partners saw upward of 90 percent of their storage  freed up by compressing data. That obviously offers cost savings. Remember, storage is not just the cost of the disk but the space, power, cooling, administration, and everything around it.
Beyond cost savings, it actually delivers better performance because you're moving less data in and out of storage. That has a positive effect on your performance. We've also added a lot of new capabilities within the system itself focused on accelerating query performance.
And we offer continuous data ingest capability with this release. That's using parallel processing to support a continuous feed of data. This is particularly important in the warehouse scenario, so that you are able to continuously feed data into it without impacting the performance of the analytics query going on in the warehouse.
Q: What about decision-making? How does the new iteration help in that regard?
A: Our new time travel query capability lets you access and analyze information at different points in time -- both past and future -- in addition to the present. This dramatically reduces the amount of application code that needs to be written for this kind of time-dependent application.
If you're reviewing an insurance claim, for example, you need to understand the terms of the policy that were in effect at the time of the accident, which may be different than they are now. You need to be able to access that information at a point in time in the past.
If you're in the travel business and you need to review travel itineraries, which have future dates, you may find some issues. For example, if you've got a hotel booked for a week in Rome and you have a car service booked in New York City next month at the same time, then there's something wrong with that. You can quickly find out and fix it. (continued...)
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